Members of the expert advisory panel reviewing the Sidewalk Labs smart city project in Toronto were frustrated Thursday afternoon, calling for the planning process to slow down and make more time for consultation and policy development.

Members of the Digital Strategy Advisory Panel (DSAP) said there isn’t enough time to consider the thorny issues involved in a data-driven development project such as the one Sidewalk Labs is proposing.

Kurtis McBride, the CEO and co-founder of traffic data firm Miovision, warned that data-collecting sensors in the proposed Quayside project could lock the city into data collection technologies that aren’t easily changed over time.

“Before we set up a digital layer that locks us into a particular set of policy outcomes for the next 50 to 100 years, I think we need to slow down,” McBride said.

“The architecture that we’re going to set here is going to leave the 12 acres the minute it’s done, and it’s going to spread nationally, or even globally. And I think it’s exciting if we get it right, but terrifying if we get it wrong.”

Sidewalk Labs was selected by federal-provincial-municipal development agency Waterfront Toronto as the innovation and funding partner for the development of Quayside, a 12-acre plot of land on Toronto’s eastern waterfront, which was supposed to be a high-tech smart city development built “from the internet up” according to the original announcement.

Originally, Sidewalk Labs was supposed to consult for a year before publishing a Master Innovation and Development Plan (MIDP) but that process has already been significantly delayed, and the MIDP is now supposed to be published as a draft in the first three months of 2019, with a final MIDP to be sent to Waterfront Toronto for review and approval by the end of the second quarter.

But at the same time, Waterfront Toronto still hadn’t published its evaluation framework, and the agency is still consulting on key issues of data governance, privacy and intellectual property to come up with clear policy for how to evaluate the Sidewalk Labs proposal.

Andrew Clement, professor emeritus with the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information, warned that Waterfront Toronto is putting the cart before the horse by allowing Sidewalk Labs to build the MIDP before the governing agency has locked down its own digital policies.

“When you’re building a neighbourhood from the internet up … you’re intervening and you’re capturing information in the daily lives of individuals in a way that’s unprecedented,” Clement said.

“I think that there’s in some ways a fatal flaw in this process because it’s not based in an appropriately adequate understanding of the challenge that you’ve taken on.”

The risk this very aggressive timeline has, is that it sends a message that the kinds of consultation and review aren’t genuine

Michael Geist, professor, University of Ottawa

University of Ottawa professor Michael Geist, who chairs the DSAP, also worried that the panel wouldn’t have enough time to study the MIDP, which is anticipated to be hundreds of pages long.

Several panel members warned that the document would land with a thud in their laps, with limited time to study the proposals before approval.

Geist also called for Sidewalk Labs and Waterfront Toronto to slow down their development timeline to give more thought to data and privacy issues. He said by rushing it, the whole process sends a message to the public that Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs aren’t taking the consultation process seriously.

“I recognize the value of deadlines and putting feet to the fire. The risk this very aggressive timeline has, is that it sends a message that the kinds of consultation and review aren’t genuine,” Geist said.

“I don’t think anyone would look at this and say realistically, in that six-month timeline, you can do all that full review.”

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